World

How a drunk guy on a motorcycle helped create the modern biker gang

Eddie Davenport, of Tulare, California, drinks a beer on his motorcycle in Hollister, during a gathering of bikers on July 7, 1947. This photo was taken during the same shoot of a photo that ran in Life magazine later that month.

A dozen more bottles, some of them in pieces, are piled around the bike's front wheel. The look on the man's face suggests he's thoroughly intoxicated. He seems to shrugging off his sad state of affairs with a "Yeah? So what!" scoff towards the photographer.

Beneath it, Life ran a 150-word caption about the event, which was organized as a so-called Gypsy Tour by the American Motorcyclist Association but devolved into 36 hours of mayhem.

On the Fourth of July weekend 4,000 members of a motorcycle club roared into Hollister, California, for a three-day convention. They quickly tired of ordinary motorcycle thrills and turned to more exciting stunts. Racing their vehicles down the main street and through traffic lights, they rammed into restaurants and bars, breaking furniture and mirrors. Some rested by the curb. Others hardly paused. Police arrested many for drunkenness and indecent exposure but could not restore order. Finally, after two days, the cyclists left with a brazen explanation. “We like to show off. It’s just a lot of fun.” But Hollister’s police chief took a different view. Wailed he, “It’s just one hell of a mess.”

Nearly 60 years later, Americans again find themselves shocked at the mayhem that can be wrought by biker gangs. This time, unlike in Hollister, nine bikers lost their lives, victims of gunshot and stab wounds sustained during a massive gunfight that erupted between five rival gangs outside a bikini bar in Waco, Texas. Nearly 200 bikers were arrested in the wake of the brawl.

A McLennan County deputy stands guard near a group of bikers in the parking lot of a Twin Peaks restaurant Sunday, May 17, 2015, in Waco, Texas.

Image: Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune-Herald via AP/Associated Press

"This is probably one of the most gruesome crime scenes I've ever seen in my 34 years of law enforcement," said Sgt. Patrick Swanton, a Waco Police Department spokesman.

“This is not a bunch of doctors and dentists and lawyers riding Harleys,” he added. "These are criminals on Harley-Davidsons.”

The image of the rabble-rousing bikers is evident in the press coverage of the 1947 rally. "4000 Touring Cyclists Wreak Havoc in Hollister," the San Francisco Chronicle screamed. "Motorcyclists put town in an uproar," read the Associated Press. "'Battle of Hollister' Ends as Wild, Celebrating Motorcyclists Leave City," said the local Free Lance paper.

Image: LA Times/New York Times/Cycle Guide Magazine

The coverage didn't exactly do wonders for the bikers' public image.

"The national exposure that was given the Hollister incident by Life magazine and others resulted in the stigmatization of an image: the motorcyclist as deviant," wrote Daniel R. Wolf in his 1991 book, "The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers."

"Life's account started a mass-media chain reaction that saw the Hollister incident grow considerably in its sensationalistic portrayal, and, as a result, the image of the motorcyclist as deviant become more defined and immutable," he wrote in his book.

That chain reaction continued in 1949, two years after the event, when Frank Rooney wrote a short story called "Cyclist's Raid," based on Life's 150-word photo caption of the drunken biker. That was published in 1951 by Harper's magazine, where it was read by Stanley Kramer, a Hollywood producer.

He released "The Wild One" in 1953. As advertised in its trailer, "The Wild One" is "the story of a gang of hot-riding hot-heads who ride into, terrorize, and take over a town...led by that 'Streetcar' man Marlon Brando."

The writer Hunter S. Thompson, in his book "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga," later blamed "The Wild One" for creating a new breed of American outlaws inspired by the good-guy, bad-guy characters in the film.

"The truth is that 'The Wild One' — despite an admittedly fictional treatment — was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting, romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a very few had been able to find in a mirror," Thompson wrote.

Marlon Brando in scenes from the movie: 'The Wild One'.

Image: Bettmann/CORBIS

Contrary to how it was portrayed by the press, those who attended the event or were otherwise active in the motorcycling community in those days said there was little serious violence or property damage. Thousands attended the rally but less than 40 people were arrested.

"In retrospect, eyewitness accounts of the Hollister riot seem timid compared to the film," wrote Thompson. "A more accurate comment on the nature of the Hollister "riot" is the fact that a hastily assembled force of only twenty-nine cops had the whole show under control by noon of July 5."

Writing to Life later that summer, Paul Brokaw, an editor of Motorcyclist magazine, acknowledged the "disorder" in Hollister but blamed "nonmotorcycling hell-raisers and mercenary-minded barkeepers" for the violence. He also derided Life for running the photograph, which he said was faked by its photographer, Barney Peterson, because it "seared a pitiful brand on the character of tends of thousands of innocent, clean-cut, respectable, law-abiding young men and women."

Image: Life/Google

Peterson, the photographer, is no longer alive. But his one-time editor toldCycle Guide Magazine in 2010 that "Barney was not the type to fake a picture."

The man who can be seen standing behind the drunk man on the bike would beg to differ.

Gus De Serpa, a resident of Hollister, California, has said he is the man standing in the background of Barney Peterson's iconic photograph of a drunk motorcyclist in July 1947.

Gus De Serpa was working as a movie projectionist at the Granada Theatre that night and when his shift ended he wandered over to San Benito Avenue to see the crowds, he told Cycle Guide Magazine's Jerry Smith in a 1997 interview. He says he saw the photoshoot unfold — and alleges it was staged.

“We went uptown, my former wife and I, to see all the excitement, and we ran into these people. They were on the sidewalk and there was a photographer. They started to scrape up the bottles with their feet, you know, from one side to another, and then they took the motorcycle and picked it up and set it right in the glass. That’s not his motorcycle, I can tell you that. He was just in the vicinity, and he was pretty well loaded. There was a bar right there, Johnny’s Bar. I think he came wandering out of that bar, and they just got him to sit down there. I told my wife, ‘That’s not right; they shouldn’t be doing that. Let’s stand behind them so they won’t take the picture.’ I figured if I was behind them they wouldn’t take it. But he took a picture anyhow, this fellow did, he didn’t care. And then after that, everybody went on about their business."

Fifty later, two of the surviving motorcyclists who organized the event in Hollister lamented how things have changed for the worse.

"It was a time when you could have a fistfight with someone and when it was over, you'd have a beer together," J.D. Cameron, one of the motorcyclists who organized the event, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. "This was way before all this guns and dope crap."

"Yeah, we just had a little fun," said Wino Willie Forkner, another member of the group. "We didn't do anything wrong."

"We were rebelling against the establishment, for Chrissakes," Forkner told the San Francisco Chronicleone year later. "You go fight a goddamn war, and the minute you get back and take off the uniform and put on Levi's and leather jackets, they call you an a —. In the early days of biking, they immediately thought you were an outlaw sort of person. We didn't think we were. We didn't go around banging heads."

One week later, thousands of bikers rolled into Hollister to mark the 50th anniversary of the rowdy convention.

Thousands of motorcycles jam San Benito Street Saturday, July 5, 1997, in downtown Hollister, Calif. Tens of thousands of people flocked to this small California town over the fourth of July weekend for the 50th anniversary of the rowdy rally that inspired the Marlon Brando movie, "The Wild One".

Image: Ben Margot/Associated Press

In a little over a month, thousands will head there again. The Hollister Freedom Rally kicks off July 3.

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